Government Openness at Issue As Bush Holds On to Records

By ADAM CLYMER

Published: January 3, 2003

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Jan. 2—
The Bush administration has put a much tighter lid than recent presidents on government proceedings and the public release of information, exhibiting a penchant for secrecy that has been striking to historians, legal experts and lawmakers of both parties.

Some of the Bush policies, like closing previously public court proceedings, were prompted by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and are part of the administration's drive for greater domestic security. Others, like Vice President Dick Cheney's battle to keep records of his energy task force secret, reflect an administration that arrived in Washington determined to strengthen the authority of the executive branch, senior administration officials say.

Some of the changes have sparked a passionate public debate and excited political controversy. But other measures taken by the Bush administration to enforce greater government secrecy have received relatively little attention, masking the proportions of what dozens of experts described in recent interviews as a sea change in government openness.

A telling example came in late 2001 when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the new policy on the Freedom of Information Act, a move that attracted relatively little public attention.

Although the new policy for dealing with the 1966 statute that has opened millions of pages of government records to scholars, reporters and the public was announced after Sept. 11, it had been planned well before the attacks.

The Ashcroft directive encouraged federal agencies to reject requests for documents if there was any legal basis to do so, promising that the Justice Department would defend them in court. It was a stark reversal of the policy set eight years earlier, when the Clinton administration told agencies to make records available whenever they could, even if the law provided a reason not to, so long as there was no ''foreseeable harm'' from the release.

Generally speaking, said Alan Brinkley, a Columbia University historian, while secrecy has been increasingly attractive to recent administrations, ''this administration has taken it to a new level.''

Its ''instinct is to release nothing,'' Professor Brinkley said, adding that this was not necessarily because there were particular embarrassing secrets to hide, but ''they are just worried about what's in there that they don't know about.''

The Bush administration contends that it is not trying to make government less open. Ari Fleischer, the president's press secretary, said, ''The bottom line remains the president is dedicated to an open government, a responsive government, while he fully exercises the authority of the executive branch.''

Secrecy is almost impossible to quantify, but there are some revealing measures. In the year that ended on Sept. 30, 2001, most of which came during the Bush presidency, 260,978 documents were classified, up 18 percent from the previous year. And since Sept. 11, three new agencies were given the power to stamp documents as ''Secret'' -- the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.

In Congress, where objections to secrecy usually come from the party opposed to the president, the complaints are bipartisan. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat first elected in 1974, said, ''Since I've been here, I have never known an administration that is more difficult to get information from.'' Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said things were getting worse, and ''it seems like in the last month or two I've been running into more and more stonewalls.''

Mr. Cheney says the Bush policies have sought to restore the proper powers of the executive branch. Explaining the fight to control the task force records to ABC News last January, he said that over more than three decades: ''I have repeatedly seen an erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job. We saw it in the War Powers Act, we saw it in the Anti-Impoundment Act. We've seen it in cases like this before, where it's demanded that the presidents cough up and compromise on important principles. One of the things that I feel an obligation on, and I know the president does, too, because we talked about it, is to pass on our offices in better shape than we found them to our successors.''

Mr. Bush has made similar comments. But the more relevant history may have been in Texas, where Mr. Bush, as governor, was also reluctant to make government records public. Confronted with a deadline to curb air pollution, he convened a private task force to propose solutions and resisted efforts to make its deliberations public. When he left office, he sent his papers not to the Texas State Library in Austin, but to his father's presidential library at College Station. That library was unable to cope with demands for access, and the papers have since been sent to the state library.

Framing an Argument

One argument underlies many of the administration's steps: that presidents need confidential and frank advice and that they cannot get it if the advice becomes public, cited by Mr. Cheney in reference to the task force and by Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, in explaining the administration's decision to delay the release of President Ronald Reagan's papers.

Mr. Gonzales said ''the pursuit of history'' should not ''deprive a president of candid advice while making crucial decisions.''

Correction: January 4, 2003, Saturday A front-page article yesterday about the Bush administration's increased use of secrecy misstated the name of an organization that sued over the policy on sealing presidential records. It is the Public Citizen Litigation Group, not the Public Interest Litigation Group. Because of an editing error, the article also referred incorrectly to Tom Blanton's role at the National Security Archive, which collects and posts documents gained through the Freedom of Information Act. He is executive director, not just a staff member.